“The Eco-Sense House is alive! From dream (see episode 103*) to reality. Its curving cob walls embrace Ann and Gord Baird’s three-generation family. A living roof offers summer cooling and filters winter rains stored for garden water. The composting toilet provides rich soil for the veggie gardens, which supply much of the family’s food. This “net zero energy” house uses the sun for electricity, hot water, and warm floors. Tour this small-footprint house, designed as part of the ecosystem surrounding it. Episode 230.”
green building
Affordable Lava Rock Insulation for the Far North
Porous lava rock — scoria (cinders) and pumice — is an ideal building material. We’ve covered this amazing material many times on our blog, but I just learned something very exciting. It turns out scoria is available in Alaska, British Columbia and to some extent the Yukon. All these areas have cinder cones (a type of volcano) that produce scoria. This is great news because porous lightweight lava rock is a good insulator and also fireproof, rot proof, easy to work with and doesn’t attract pests. It’s affordable if there’s a nearby source to minimize shipping costs. So this discovery makes it practical to build lightweight superinsulated earthbag houses in Alaska and Canada. Use the search engine on the right to search this site for details and example projects.
Spiral Straw Bale Home in Denmark
“Poula-Line built her straw bale home in Fri & Fro (Free and Happy) ecoVillage in Egebjerg, Denmark. It’s one of a collection of unique straw bale homes in the village. Her home was inspired by a conch shell she found on a beach in Malaysia. Poula, just like Rachel, lived in a small straw bale cabin on her land while she built her home.”
Build it With Bales – Free Download
Free downloadable version (photocopied pages) of Matts Myhrman’s classic straw bale book for private use. The easy to understand explanations and simple line drawings make it a joy to read and refer to as you’re building. Although this book is 99% excellent information, readers are warned of a few errors in this somewhat dated book. One example is do not use bales under a slab floor as shown.
Costa Rica Earthbag Time Lapse
Earthbag House Time-lapse – February/March 2013 from The Yoga Farm on Vimeo.
February/March 2013 This is 6 weeks of work in 2 and a half minutes :)